The Strangers by Naomi Alderman

They came from nowhere, and now they are everywhere.

A few months after her mother dies, the novelist Naomi Alderman sets up a wildlife camera in the back garden of her parents’ home. It captures the first image of a strange new animal. Low to the ground, about the size of a badger, flat face, long, trunk-like nose. Suddenly these “mimmoths” are as common as foxes or dogs. And no one knows where they’ve come from.

As Alderman negotiates the territory of grief – a place with its own logic and rhythms – the mimmoths spread. From the UK east and west, to the United States, to Russia, to India. They seem harmless, but oddly intelligent. They cannot be captured, they will not take food from humans, they have their own purposes.

Alderman cannot shake the feeling that she has a particular connection to the creatures. Or is she just succumbing to ‘mimmoth psychosis’? As the impact of the mimmoths increases, she is pulled into the cross currents of conspiracy theories and global power struggles. Have her deeply personal forms of mourning lent recent events a surreal air, or is our reality changing drastically and irrevocably?

From the award-winning author of the international bestseller, The Power, The Strangers is a thrillingly original and devastatingly moving novel that blurs the lines between fiction and reality, inviting us to reconsider what it means to be human. It’s like nothing you’ll have read before.

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PRE-READING

I don't know what to do with this book.

I mean that as a compliment.

We have a strange new animal, grief, miscarriage, questions about reality, conspiracy theories, global political consequences and what appears to be a substantial amount of Naomi Alderman's own life folded into the story. I have absolutely no idea where the boundary between autobiography and fiction lies, and I'm not sure I want to know.

There is something slightly unnerving about reading a fictionalised Naomi processing experiences that may or may not be fictionalised versions of things that actually happened to her. Particularly when the entire book is asking how much of what we experience can be trusted.

Excellent. Let's go.

POST-READING

The Strangers is one of those books where attempting to explain exactly what happens somehow makes it sound considerably less interesting.

The basic premise is wonderfully strange: a new intelligent animal, nicknamed mimmoths, suddenly begins appearing in England and then across the world. They are fascinating and frustrating in equal measure. They seem to understand human traps, won't be tamed, aren't interested in accepting food and don't particularly seem interested in allowing humans to understand them.

I desperately wanted to know more about them.

And yet, when the book ends without giving us a nice little field guide to mimmoth behaviour, I didn't feel cheated.

That's because I don't think the mimmoths are actually the point.

They are the mechanism through which the book gets to Naomi: her mother's death, repeated miscarriages, her memories of her own life and the ways in which grief can change the shape of reality. Naomi is constantly looking backwards, considering how different choices might have changed things, how her experiences have affected her and whether the world she's currently experiencing is really the world she thinks it is.

The mimmoths make that uncertainty literal.

There are moments when it becomes difficult to know whether Naomi is noticing something genuinely strange or whether grief is making connections that aren't there. The possibility of "mimmoth psychosis" becomes particularly unsettling because the question isn't simply whether she's right about the animals. It's whether the person experiencing something has any reliable way of distinguishing an altered reality from an altered perception.

And the book is very interested in that space.

I also appreciated that the mimmoths themselves remain genuinely other. They aren't secretly waiting to become our friends. They aren't conveniently available for scientific study. They don't exist simply to give humanity a new source of wonder or a new problem to solve. They have their own purposes, and humans are left trying to interpret behaviour that wasn't designed for human understanding.

There are implications towards the end about what they might actually be, but they remain implications. And, surprisingly, that worked for me.

Because this isn't really a book about explaining the mimmoths.

It's a book about what happens when something incomprehensible enters a world where people are already trying desperately to make sense of things.

That makes the autobiographical element particularly fascinating. I genuinely don't know how much of Naomi's experience is drawn from real life, and I'm not going to pretend that I do. But there are passages that have the uncomfortable intimacy of someone thinking about things they have actually lived through rather than constructing an entirely fictional person's history.

The result is a book that feels simultaneously intimate and enormous: one woman's grief unfolding against something that may be changing the entire world.

And somehow, amongst all of this, there are moments of extraordinary peace.

A garden. Flowers moving in the breeze. The ordinary world continuing to exist while something deeply strange is happening just beyond it.

I think that contrast is what stayed with me most. Grief doesn't stop the world. The flowers still move. People still have conversations. Animals still appear in gardens. Somewhere, somebody is still making dinner. Meanwhile, your own understanding of reality can feel as though it has been completely rearranged.

This is not an easy book to categorise. It isn't quite literary fiction, quite speculative fiction, quite memoir, quite horror, quite mystery. It borrows from all of them without settling comfortably into any one of their boxes.

Honestly, I think it would be rather a shame if it did.

It is strange, unsettling, thoughtful and occasionally devastating. And I still want to know what the hell a mimmoth actually is.

RECOMMENDATIONS

This is a difficult one to recommend by genre because I suspect the most useful recommendation is "Do you enjoy books that leave you thinking about them afterwards?"

If you liked the reality-bending uncertainty of The Employees by Olga Ravn, or the quietly uncanny examination of grief and identity in Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield, there is a reasonable chance this will work for you.

But go in expecting questions rather than answers. Particularly about the mimmoths.

You have been warned.

MUSIC PAIRING

“From the Morning” — Nick Drake

Quiet, beautiful and touched with melancholy, with a sense of the natural world carrying on regardless of whatever enormous things are happening inside the person looking at it.

VIBE CHECK

Colour palette: faded greens, soft grey, cream and the dusky pink of flowers in late afternoon.

Soundtrack: very soft music playing somewhere indoors, birds in the garden, leaves moving in the breeze. Occasionally, the distant sound of something you cannot quite identify.

Season: late spring edging into summer, when everything is growing faster than you can keep track of it.

Mood: grief-stricken, contemplative and quietly uncanny.

Scent: damp earth, crushed grass, flowers warming in the sun.

Texture: cool ceramic, soft leaves between your fingers, old photographs and the slightly rough paper of a notebook.

And somewhere beyond the garden fence, there is an animal you have never seen before.

You aren't entirely sure whether it's really there.

TAROT CARD PULLED

The Empress

At first glance, The Empress might seem like an odd choice for such an unsettling book. But the more I think about it, the more inevitable it feels.

The Empress is motherhood, fertility, the body, nature and creation—but also the complicated reality of what happens when creation and loss exist side by side.

That makes her particularly resonant with Naomi's experiences of motherhood and miscarriage, but she also connects beautifully to the mimmoths and their relationship with the natural world. Their presence changes things around them in ways humans don't fully understand, while the plants and gardens provide some of the book's quietest moments of beauty.

The Empress also asks us to sit with the fact that life doesn't always obey the narratives we want to give it.

Things grow.

Things die.

Things appear that we didn't expect.

And sometimes we don't get to know why.

THE TRUE QUESTION

How do you make sense of a world that refuses to make sense for you?